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Who says Parliament is boring — the Senate irrelevant and the Commons just a yak-fest? In the past few days, proceedings in both houses have proven riveting, especially in the televised Commons where the opposition has done what no one else has been able to for months: crack open Stephen Harper’s armour of denial and obfuscation in the Senate scandal.

The videos from Question Period should be shown to students in high schools and universities to illustrate the difference between our parliamentary form of government and the American system. Had Congress been set up to grill the president regularly, as Parliament does the prime minister, Washington’s executive and legislative branches would be less isolated in their silos.

As much as Harper has tried to make the Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin and Patrick Brazeau affair go away, it is mostly Parliament that has not let him.

It was relentless opposition questioning that forced Harper to finally acknowledge a flaw in his oft-repeated script. He has maintained since June that only Nigel Wright knew what Nigel Wright was doing in writing the infamous $90,000 cheque to Duffy — “it was not communicated to me or to members of my office.” On Thursday, the prime minister changed it — “he informed very few people.” In typical Harper fashion, he did not admit to the alteration. He just snuck it in at the end of a sentence during a long line of exchanges with NDP Leader Tom Mulcair.

It was the Senate that offered Duffy and Wallin the best platform to fight back.

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No fury being as potent as that of a lover scorned, the two relished getting back at Harper. Old pros at oral presentation, both put on a good show and got the headlines they coveted. But their performance won’t save them, rightly so.

Their chief complaint, that the Conservative majority in the Senate is suspending them without due process, is valid. So is their suggestion that their overspending was the norm around Ottawa and that it became an issue with Harper only when it became an issue with the public.

Still their profligacy at the taxpayers’ expense remains the greater sin, by far. That’s why Harper’s harping on that point has been so effective, all the more so because, whatever else his weaknesses, his personal financial probity has been beyond reproach. No Gucci shoes for him, no designer purses for Laureen.

The “monstrous political scheme” that Duffy ascribed to the PMO is nothing more than a prime minister getting rid of a political liability.

The most useful thing he and Wallin did was to give the public a graphic insight into how Harper operates. He is ruthless and can turn on a dime. That’s what he showed when he quickly cast aside Brian Mulroney during a 2007 public inquiry into the latter’s business dealings with German lobbyist Karlheinz Schreiber. That’s what Harper has done with Duffy, Wallin and Brazeau. And now he wants to strip them of their platform, perks and pay (“a mean, arbitrary and cruel … professional capital punishment on our colleagues,” as Tory Senator Hugh Segal put it).

The real issues are whether Harper has been telling the truth about what, exactly, he knew and when; whether the prime ministerial sherpas interfered with the law by promising to avoid an independent audit, doctoring reports and paying hush money; and whether the RCMP finds grounds in those actions for fraud and breach of trust.

The political damage is already done, as it should have. Harper will find hard to escape it, even if the Senate suspends the three senators this week, in time for the Conservative Party’s policy convention in Calgary next weekend.

It is poetic justice that a prime minister who has been getting a free ride for years with his phony campaign of “reforming the Senate,” something he constitutionally cannot do without provincial approval (as the Quebec Court of Appeal rightly ruled Wednesday), has been tripped up by that same body and by the people he had hand-picked for it.

Harper’s iron grip on his caucus has been loosened. There’s open dissent — not widespread but enough to hurt him. There’s public sniping between prominent Tories — again, involving not too many but enough to crack open the façade of unity.

A prime minister does have greater leeway than an American president. But the parliamentary system can expose his authoritarianism in ways that can spell the beginning of his end.

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